


Tintinnabulation

by balloonstand



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alcohol warning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 16:36:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1864860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balloonstand/pseuds/balloonstand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Change of plans. We’re drinking tonight.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tintinnabulation

**Author's Note:**

> Because I do not have the funds to get hammered to celebrate finishing my exams, I am celebrating by getting fictional people drunk and living vicariously.

The nice thing about Gwaine is that he has, over the years Merlin has known him, taught Merlin a rather impressive tolerance for alcohol. But the _wonderful_ thing about Gwaine is that he also always gives Merlin enough alcohol to push him past this impressive tolerance into new levels of drunkenness. Tonight he had outdone himself.

The world spins, which is rather _rude_ , Merlin thinks. He’s already drunk enough that everything is blurry, he doesn’t need it to be spinning too. He has to sit down before he falls down. If he falls, people will laugh and Arthur will call him names tomorrow.

The chairs in his immediate line of sight are all occupied by the knights. Or at least big reddish blurs that vaguely resemble the knights. Merlin isn’t too drunk that magicking one of them out of his chair seems like a good idea, though he is drunk enough that the thought occurs to him as at least a viable option.

Instead, he stumbles his way forward until he finds somewhere he can sit. It’s not until he looks up and sees stars and night sky that he realizes he is outside the tavern. He should feel cold, his mind informs him. He does not feel cold. That’s probably not a good thing. It’s quieter outside and for the first time Merlin feels the full effect of his inebriation. His magic hates sharing his body with alcohol. It buzzes within him, stretching and compacting itself impatiently and racing through his veins, chasing the alcohol like it’s trying to push it out of Merlin’s blood. If Merlin were more intellectually curious, he might run some sort of experiment about the effect of alcohol on his magic and vice versa. He is not intellectually curious, but he is rather drunk, so what the hell. He hold his hand palms up and searches for the right words. Much harder to do now than when he’s sober and reading those words out of one of Gaius’ books. Before he can find the words he’s looking for, the wall he is leaning against disappears abruptly and Merlin falls backwards. He thinks that maybe he accidentally vanished the wall and panics, wondering how he’s going to explain part of the tavern currently hosting King Arthur and his various armed knights vanishing.

“ _Mer_ lin, how much have you had to drink?” slurs a voice behind him.

Merlin sit upright. The wall hasn’t disappeared. He had been leaning against the door, which had opened. These two realizations take up too much of Merlin’s brain power for him to process and understand the words of the question he’s just been asked.

“Arthur,” Merlin says to show that he’s trying. Arthur shakes his head and staggers over to a bench along the tavern’s wall. Merlin briefly considers staying where he is sitting on the steps of the tavern until morning, until winter, until he dies. But Arthur left room for him on the bench so Merlin struggles to a standing position and drags himself toward Arthur. He sits too close to Arthur. Their shoulders brush and their knees touch. Merlin has careful rules about touching his king. Namely, don’t. Not unless Arthur is the one to initiate. Tonight, the wine darkening Merlin’s veins is a good distraction from the normal rules. Tomorrow’s hangover and regret will be the punishment for his transgression, but for now, the warmth against his knee and his shoulder is his reward.

Arthur smells like the tavern. He is booze and sweat and dirty chairs all dressed up in the king’s clothes. Merlin doesn’t understand it. Earlier today, Arthur was himself, as he always is. He was pacing around the castle dropping gloves and papers for Merlin to collect as he followed. He was shouting at the knights and talking patiently with the maid who dropped a freshly cleaned load of laundry in the dust. He was a gracious host to the score of noblemen invited to Camelot to talk about revising taxes on their land.

He was supposed to be with those noblemen now. He had planned to drink with them tonight at the castle. He didn’t say it, but Merlin knew he wanted to get them drunk and hear them speak plainly. Arthur always had preferred a blunt truth to a riddling truth. He had had Merlin arrange for three caskets of wine to be brought up for the occasion. But then after dinner, Arthur had caught Merlin’s arm as he was leaving and whispered in his ear, “Change of plans. We’re drinking tonight.”

“Yes, sire. I have the wine you asked for.”

“No, Merlin, I mean that you and I and the knights are going to the tavern.”

“The tavern?” Merlin asked in surprise.

“Yes, the tavern. Surely you are familiar with it, you seem to spend all your free time there.” Arthur didn’t mention the noblemen who would be waiting for him all night as they drank his wine alone. He brushed past Merlin out of the room, leaving Merlin confused, but not worried yet.

“You really are a pathetic lightweight, Merlin,” Arthur is saying now. “Is there any task which you can perform like a man, or are you a girl in everything that you do?” Merlin wants to tell him that there are definitely tasks he performs as a man, but he also wants to know why they are at the tavern and allowing Arthur to distract him with insults won’t get him answers.

“Gwaine started this drinking game,” Merlin says and Arthur rolls his eyes. Merlin can’t actually see him do it because they are sitting facing forward, but he can feel the eye roll.

“You let Gwaine talk you into doing the most ridiculous things,” Arthur says. Merlin thinks about Sigan and Morgana and the troll and all the ridiculous things he has done for Arthur. He tries not to think about all the ridiculous things he would do for Arthur if Arthur asked him to, if he even hinted at wanting them.

“Gwaine’s a good friend,” Merlin says because Arthur seems to expect some sort of explanation. “He’d do the same for me.”

Arthur nods thoughtfully, like Merlin has made an excellent point. Maybe he has. Now that Merlin thinks about it, he says smart things to Arthur all the time. He probably just said something especially intelligent.

“That’s why I made him a knight, you know,” Arthur says quietly.

“I thought you made him a knight because you were desperate.”

Arthur hums. “Isn’t that what I said?”

Merlin doesn’t answer and they sit quietly for a minute. It begins to drizzle. They both groan and shift around like they’re going to stand up and go back inside, but they get stuck on the standing up part. It’s a light drizzle, more of a mist. They can endure it. Arthur’s hair darkens with the water and it sticks to his forehead in clumps. Merlin looks away from the too-appealing sight of it and in his mind he runs imagined hands through the hair, brushing it back off his king’s face. He wonders if sitting on his hands would make his thoughts too obvious. He shivers a little, partially because of the rain, more because his imagined hands are cupping Arthur’s face now, stroking thumbs along cheekbones. When he shivers, Arthur makes a short, jerky motion with his hand, like he was reaching out to Merlin before he thought better of it.

Merlin is beginning to feel like he and Arthur should be talking about something in particular, though he doesn’t know what. There is something heavy growing in their silence. If Merlin lets it build any more, it will break through and crash down over them both.

Or maybe he just has to pee. It’s hard to tell when he’s drunk.

He sighs. He wants to fidget too, but he’s too full-up of magic and he can’t let any of it escape. He wouldn’t want Arthur to find out about his magic like this. He wishes that Arthur already knew about his magic. Every moment when he could reveal his magic and himself to Arthur seemed both too soon in their relationship and too late. Arthur is too familiar to lie to and too much of a stranger for Merlin to know what he will say when he finds out about the magic. Now that he is king, Merlin can imagine telling him less and less. He wants to tell him more and more.

“Are you enjoying your night, sire?” Merlin asks when the silence stretches too long.

“I can see why you come here so often,” Arthur says after a short pause. Merlin pouts because he does not come here often and because Arthur is dodging his question.

“You’re enjoying it? More than you would drinking with those nobles?” Merlin presses clumsily.

“Merlin,” Arthur says sharply. He doesn’t tense his body the way his voice does. If anything, he slumps a little more.

“You didn’t invite them here.” Merlin has never been able to clamp down on the urge to poke, to prod. To scratch at the scab.

“They’d be offended if I took them here,” Arthur says slowly, his words weighed down with his inebriation.

“What, to this fine and respectable establishment?” Merlin says just as a rowdy cheer spills out of the tavern. Merlin swings one leg over the bench so he’s straddling it, facing Arthur. Arthur smiles and shakes his head at the joke. “Still,” Merlin says, “it’s a good enough place for the king to abandon his nobles for it.”

Arthur’s smile slides off his face. He purses his mouth in a way that Merlin recognizes as his _things aren’t going my way and they really should be_ expression. Arthur almost immediately smooths his face into a blank calm that Merlin is beginning to recognize as Arthur remembering that he is a lonely and stoic king who shouldn’t broadcast his emotions to his subordinates.

His familiarity with the subtleties of Arthur’s expressions hits Merlin solidly in the gut and he feels nauseous for a moment. There was something important in his knowledge of the way Arthur’s lips and eyes look for each one of his emotions. Familiarity is its own kind of intimacy. Not the intimacy of lovers, perhaps, but intimacy all the same. It is impossible to have that knowledge of someone without-

Without what?

Without feeling like he understands Arthur better than anyone else? Without wanting to help, to serve? Without falling in love? That’s a pointless observation. He knows he’s in love, he’s known for years. Mostly when he’s this drunk. Shit, he’s so drunk.

So is Arthur. Merlin had watched him fall deeper into his inebriation the whole night, draining one pint after another at a speed that made even Gwaine raise an eyebrow. No one said anything about it – what could anyone possibly say to their king as he drank too much too quickly – but Merlin knew they were all counting the number of times Arthur called for a refill.

Abruptly, but too late, Merlin realizes how unhappy Arthur must be tonight. Arthur has a strong – often annoyingly strong – sense of duty and obligation. Even when the task is unpleasant, Arthur does it proudly for the good of the kingdom. No matter how much Arthur didn’t want to, Merlin would have expected Arthur to swallow his distaste and entertain his noblemen.

“Why are we here, Arthur?” Merlin whispers. He doesn’t dare ask any louder, not with Arthur so miserable.

“To drink,” Arthur says, like its obvious. It is obvious, but too obscure all the same.

Oh, Merlin is drunk, drunk, drunk. And so is Arthur.

Or is he? Merlin thinks hard to remember, but he can’t draw out any memories of Arthur actually taking a drink. There are plenty of memories of him getting a refill, usually when he bought his knights another round. Arthur had been playing up his drunkenness inside earlier, Merlin realizes. Tonight is just a performance. The knights must have seen Arthur today with the noblemen, seen his unhappiness while Merlin ran around the castle doing odd jobs for Gaius. They must have offered a night at the tavern to help him unwind. Arthur never drank to unwind, he fought and he planned future fights. Coming here, enjoying himself with his friends, it was simply giving the knights what they expected.

Merlin has to shut his eyes for a moment. The loose magic in him tightens at this realization, squeezing him inside. He doesn’t want to think of his king, his brave, stubborn, wise, idiotic king putting on a show for the people who love him. He hates that he didn’t see through it sooner.

“Arthur,” Merlin says, more self-conscious than ever of the slight slur to his words, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Arthur asks.

Merlin realizes that he’s left Arthur several steps behind in his thought process. “You’re not here to drink, Arthur. I saw you not drink.”

Arthur turns on the bench so he and Merlin are facing one another. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, _Mer_ lin,” he says coldly. He’s not slurring at all.

Merlin feels exposed. More, he feels like he’s leaking, like he’s bleeding out on Arthur, spilling what he should be holding inside. And next to him, Arthur is a fortress. His windows are shuttered and his doors are bolted. Nothing is revealed, making Merlin’s vulnerability harsher. He must be dripping his feelings all over, there’s nothing he can hide from Arthur like this. Arthur must know everything. The magic, the love, even the filthy lust. The thoughts Merlin has about him late at night when he’s too tired to pretend that he doesn’t desire his king in every way.

Merlin sighs and stands up, sways slightly before he gets his balance. “Come on.”

“Are you going back inside?” Arthur asks. He stands too.

“No, Arthur. I’m taking you back to the castle. No, don’t argue,” he says as Arthur starts to do just that. “You have a long day ahead of you tomorrow and I don’t want to have to listen to you complain about your head or how tired you are. Come on, let’s go.”

“You know you can’t actually tell me what to do, Merlin,” Arthur says by route. He’s already following Merlin out to the street.

They walk through the lower town in silence. Neither speaks until they are back at the castle, and even then it is only Arthur asking one of the maids about how his noblemen fared that night.

In Arthur’s chamber, Merlin lights only one candle. There is no point in lighting more when Arthur will only get into bed and sleep. He takes Arthur’s nightclothes out of the closet and lays them on the bed. Arthur stands in the doorway, watching him. He doesn’t step forward when Merlin lays the clothes out, so Merlin busies himself with turning down the bedclothes and straightening and tidying where he can. Every time he looks at Arthur, Arthur is watching him. Finally, Merlin stops fretting around the room. He gestures for Arthur to come closer.

Merlin looks back down at the nightclothes as Arthur approaches. He doesn’t meet Arthur’s eye as he helps tug Arthur’s shirt over his head. He never does. He keeps his eyes on the material of the shirt as much as possible, and off of Arthur’s smooth skin. Sometimes, when the days are long and Arthur goes to bed early, the sunlight glints off of Arthur’s skin making it glow. Tonight, the dim candlelight touches Arthur’s skin in patches, softening old scars and making him look closer to the prince he was when Merlin met him than the king he is today.

Merlin drops Arthur’s shirt on the floor to pick up later and grabs the nightshirt from the bed. The quick movement tips the careful internal balance he had been focusing on to remain steady despite the alcohol. The whole room slants suddenly and Merlin throws his arms forward to find something to balance against. His hands come down on Arthur’s shoulders.

He must have more forward momentum than he had thought, because he pushes Arthur off-balance. They sway back and forth, shuffling their feet to keep standing. The scuffle ends when Arthur presses Merlin against the bedpost to balance them both.

Merlin stares breathlessly at the space between Arthur’s lips and his eyes, not quite trusting himself to look at either.

Then, the unimaginable.

Arthur leans forward and presses his lips gently against Merlin’s. He lingers for a moment only, then pulls back. He puts his fingers under Merlin’s chin, tilts his face back so Merlin looks him in the eye.

Merlin can’t move. The shock, the drink. He’s stuck. Arthur’s eyes shutter again. He steps back from Merlin and crosses the room, putting his back to Merlin.

“Leave,” he says, his voice rough and cold. “Now.”

“Arthur-“

“ _Get out._ ”

Merlin doesn’t move. He lifts his fingers to press them to his lips. He has that tingling, _living_ feeling that he gets whenever he performs a particularly beautiful piece of magic.

“I told you to leave, Merlin,” Arthur says over his shoulder.

“I didn’t listen,” Merlin says.

“Don’t test me tonight, Merlin,” Arthur says. He advances on Merlin once more. “I’m in no mood for it. For once, just do as you’re told and _get out_ and we’ll never- never speak of this again.”

They are nose to nose again. Merlin still doesn’t move. Arthur’s eyes flicker over Merlin’s face and something in them softens. Merlin tilts his head and Arthur mirrors the movement like he’s mesmerized. Arthur leans in for the second time that night and this time Merlin is ready for him.

He lets the kiss remain soft for a moment, then he deepens it. He parts his lips and greedily tastes, tastes, tastes. He must taste like alcohol, but Arthur tastes sweet. They kiss without breaking apart for several long minutes, stopping only when Arthur pushes Merlin down onto the bed. Arthur climbs atop him, straddling him. He leans down like he’s about to kiss Merlin again – Merlin is ready to be kissed again – but he stops before he does. He brushes his lips down Merlin’s nose, then across each cheek and his forehead, like a blessing. He bows his head to whisper in Merlin’s ear.

“Tell me to stop and we can forget this all.”

Merlin threads his fingers through Arthur’s hair and clings. “Don’t, please don’t stop, Arthur.”

Arthur kisses him again. This kiss is more rushed, more aggressive, more urgent. It’s a prelude, Merlin can tell, and he wants to go where it is leading.

They remove their clothes carelessly and without finesse, but they do it quickly and the feeling of their skin sliding together is more important than finesse. Merlin could make a joke about the king undressing his servant, but he can’t. The speechlessness that began with Arthur’s lips against his still holds him silent, except for the exhalations and small moans that feeling Arthur pressing along his body produces.

They rock together, touching everywhere they can. They are tangled up in one another from toes to tongues. As Merlin arches up, Arthur grinds down and they are touching, touching, touching, touching, god, Merlin has wanted this for so long. He gasps and runs his hands down Arthur’s back and up again to tangle in his hair. Arthur hisses through his teeth. His hips jerk and he is pressing down on Merlin harder. The warmth and hardness of Arthur’s cock against Merlin’s is so good.

Next time, Merlin thinks wildly, next time he will take his time with Arthur and run his fingers down Arthur’s cock. He will map it out with his tongue, every ridge and vein. He will leave no silky smooth inch of it unexplored or unattended. He will spend hours learning Arthur’s cock until he can recognize it by taste alone.

He must be saying some of this aloud because Arthur speeds his thrusts against Merlin and says Merlin’s name several times in a breathless, beautifully desperate way. The precome leaking from both of them makes the slide of their cocks together smooth and slippery.

Merlin runs his hands down Arthur’s side again and closes them around Arthur’s ass. He pulls Arthur closer into him, not sure what he’s trying to do other than bring them so close together that that merge and meld into one. The sensations of Arthur’s erection against his own spike suddenly and Merlin shakes as he comes.

Arthur follows him just as Merlin is returning to himself and Merlin loves the feeling of Arthur’s hot come splattering down his front.

Arthur’s arms where they are holding him up shake and fall to his sides, sending all of Arthur’s weight down on Merlin. Merlin makes a little _oof_ sound, but he doesn’t protest. He wraps his arms around Arthur and they don’t move, not for a long while.

In the morning, Merlin gets to see Arthur wake up for the hundredth or perhaps thousandth time. Unlike the previous hundred or thousand times, he gives Arthur the chance to wake at his own pace. He especially likes the brush of Arthur's lashes against his cheek as he blinks the sleep away. For the first time in all those hundreds or thousands of mornings, Merlin dares to do what he wants. He brushes his knuckles along Arthur's cheekbones. He kisses Arthur good morning.


End file.
